


let the dead be dead

by griefiary



Series: mothers of a dead boy [2]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics), Under the Red Hood
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Flashbacks, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, Jason Todd is Red Hood, Jason Todd is Robin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:06:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23873635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/griefiary/pseuds/griefiary
Summary: He visits the woman in the dirt, tells himself he needs to do this.
Relationships: Sheila Haywood & Jason Todd
Series: mothers of a dead boy [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1720555
Comments: 2
Kudos: 21





	let the dead be dead

The pitter patter of his heartbeat thrumming in his veins does nothing but magnify the bubbling anxiety that folds in and over his chest. He lets it fuel him now, breathes in and out when it courses through him in waves of unfiltered anguish. Something green burns through his paper heart, rising flames he knows too well to be hatred & trepidation that ravage through that last claim to the rowdy, hearty youth of a boy too consumed with the desire to be loved by a woman who’d never see him as her own. But it lingers, the wicked, vile need of arms wrapped around him securely, to be looked upon and unconditionally loved; it haunts him at near every waking hour. The legacy of a flightless bird, a cold hunger for that which he can never have.

He flares his nostrils, rests the sledgehammer against his knee in an easy motion. The name ‘𝗗𝗥. 𝗦𝗛𝗘𝗜𝗟𝗔 𝗛𝗔𝗬𝗪𝗢𝗢𝗗’ is engraved in bold lettering, under it lay the words, ‘A MOST GENEROUS SOUL’ in the same font, and the inscription ‘.ת.נ.צ.ב.ה’. The irony is not lost on him in the slightest. No mention of her ever being in Gotham General’s maternity ward, abandoning her boy the moment things didn’t look up. The world knew her as a bleeding heart, working under the Doctors without Borders program, aiding in distributing medical supplies in the turbulent region of northern Qurac. Jason knew her to be anything but in his final shared moments with her — MURDERESS, EMBEZZLER, MONSTER — she was everything Jason had grown to resent. She’d shown him her true colors, unveiled her crimes before him, pulled her own gun on him after he trusted her to show him what the Joker had done.

Something sours again, memories of a lifetime past dig into him, and he bites the side of his cheek to swallow them into another abyss, deeper into himself. He chokes back the immediate urge to scream, to preach to nothing but a bare headstone, that he lived to regret ever meeting her, wishes that he’d never found his birth certificate — wishes he’d never dishonored Catherine, his 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 mother, by going out his way to seek out the validation of ‘truth’, of flesh & blood, of biology. Jason Todd died that day, and something else came back entirely, he thinks. She’d torn something out of him that the clown could never hope to, and even though he’d never been broken, had taken the hurt with a grin on his lips – the inner turmoil of his birth mother standing there and watching, not a care in the world with a Marlboro stick between her teeth, had nearly been enough to tear through his constitution.

Jason raises the sledgehammer over his head, eyes fixed on the gravestone. The pain of yesteryears long gone to time edge at the lining of his sanity, gut wrenching with that very same green. A moment passes by, and he swings down, halting in the same blink of an eye, preventing the two objects from colliding against each other. He staggers back, letting him catch his breath, the hammer easing to his side. Inhaling again, he looks down to see his hands shaking. 

𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘰𝘯'𝘵 𝘣𝘦 𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘥𝘰𝘯'𝘵, a voice rasps within him, foreign and yet grounding, 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘴𝘯'𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴.

Images of red, digital numbers flicker behind closed eyes. Unwelcome hauntings, flashes of spectral figures that exist in a warehouse, somewhere in northern Qurac. The lingering smell of cigarette smoke heavy in the air, Jason fumbling to untie a blonde woman with 𝘩𝘪𝘴 striking blue eyes. The same woman pulling his arm over her shoulder to support his injured self, sweat beading on her brow. Neither of them make it to the door, before heat engulfs them and everything goes dark. Sheila was undeserving, yet in the last two minutes of either of their lives, she’d tried. Too little, too late. But she’d tried. The familiar unwelcome need for connection wells in him again, and Jason forces back the bile that builds in his throat and the tears brimming his eyes. Sheila Haywood is undeserving. He promises himself that he never wonders why he had been cast Revenant, and not her. His grip tightens around the hammer. 

He raises it over his head in a final attempt, 

he swings, 

and drops the hammer instead. Every fiber in his being burns with the desire to reduce the stone to gravel, to dust. He can’t. Sheila could have made for the door on her own, could have simply left him to slump under the weight of his collapsed lung and shattered ribs. It wouldn’t have mattered, they both still would have died. She didn’t, though, and he doesn’t understand why. She still stood back, watched with indifference while his skin was painted black and blue, his body a canvas for the ̶c̶r̶o̶w̶b̶a̶r̶ brush. 

He stands back, the hatred in him twisting into something 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵. Not love, and certainly not something like guilt or remorse. Jason knows that he has nothing to be sorry for - Sheila lived as she died, trying to rectify the choices she made the moment it turned out that the fall out of actions wouldn’t turn in her favor. Jason was a boy, really had no business stepping into the world of vigilantism anyway. He was just a kid out of Park Row, trying to make it through the night and rise to meet the next day.

And he can’t hate her, not the way he wishes he could. He’ll always resent himself for it, that much he knows. There’ll be days and nights when he’ll be disgusted with himself, knowing Sheila is like any other of Gotham’s native scum; there was nothing, except those two minutes in the entirety of her life, that separated her from them. And still, those two minutes linger, after years of waiting to claw to the surface of his own psyche. 

It’d been years now, since that cursed spring day. 

He tells himself he has nothing, no tears for her, as he lifts his chin up high. But he falters, staggers back again, and lowers his head in what the voice tells him is resignation. Lies, lies, lies. Jason inhales through his nose, voice cracking when he speaks, eyes downcast, “Sometimes I forget that unsaid sentences do not mean unfelt emotions,” — Somewhere, farther into the cemetery, the echoes of a songbird’s sonata ring through the early morning air, embracing the solemn aria of Jason’s own song — “And I kneel into a dream where I am good & loved. I am good. I am loved. My hands have made some good mistakes. They can always make better ones.” 

The overcast sky casts a grey, stark light down onto him. The sledgehammer rests on the marked gravedirt, no longer a dead-not-dead boy’s conduit of malice, and resentment, and fear.

A body lays beneath rubble and smoke, the smell of cordite masking the scent of iron. A springtime, sun-drenched desert landscape that is a shadow of death against the blotches of obscured memoriam in his childhood. 

In his mind, he almost never sees the other body.

He sees green and thinks he might be drowning, lungs filled with ice water, but he burns all over. He’s in pain, and a woman is screaming at him, he can’t make out the words yet, but there’s force behind her push, as she guides him out of the lit pool. She takes him away from that place, and before he can ask what’s happening, the woman is already urging him towards the ocean – “𝘔𝘺 𝘧𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳,” she says, and Jason isn’t quite sure why that word hurts him yet, “𝘞𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘬𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘺𝘰𝘶. 𝘎𝘰.”

No Name of Nowhere kills his teachers. He feels numb all over when the woman asks him why, and a shrug is all he can offer her. They’re reptiles. Human traffickers, mobsters, unrepentant. He takes what they can teach him, how to craft intricate bombs, the brewing of odorless poisons, political strategy – and then he takes their life when he leaves, bodies left in stride.

The road was long and well fought. He’d come home, settled back into the tired district of the East End and carved a territory out of the rotten core of Gotham’s underworld. His hands are stained with red and voices overlaying voices scream for blood, he faces his father-not-father, and forces him to choose. The weight of the gunmetal in his hand is his only comfort, then it all goes wrong.

It was all so well thought out. 

Jason lets his hands wander into the pocket of his suit pants, feels the small rock and that he’d carried with him. He grasps it, pulls it out, and keeps his breath steady. Wordlessly, Jason leans down to lay it onto the slab that supports Sheila’s headstone. He rises again, pauses, looks north, towards where he knows a dead boy’s empty grave lays. Empty. Empty, empty, empty. Cold, worms. Ribs and hollow sockets. Muffled screaming from beneath the dirt. It’s as empty as it should be, no boy beneath the mound. 

As he turns to leave the cemetery, and let the dead be the dead, his gaze falls back to Sheila’s headstone, he purses his lips. A moment of thought keeps him still, before he departs with his final words, “I won’t let you hide behind redemption.”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr under "griefiary"!


End file.
